Enterprising Initiatives in the Experience Economy

Transforming Social Worlds

Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Per Blenker, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Per Blenker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415731331
• eBook ISBN: 9781317910930
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Over the last decade, the close relationship between culture and economy - or "the experience economy" – has risen on the agenda. Although there is an established research field for analysing the economic impact of entrepreneurship, there is currently a limited amount of research that analyses the cultural impact and opportunity of entrepreneurship. Linking experience economy with enterprising behavior moves the term away from businesses' competitiveness and consumer behavior towards a more value-focused business in general.

This ground-breaking book integrates entrepreneurship and empowerment into one central theme, drawing on research from both the social sciences (innovation, entrepreneurship, empowerment and activism) and the humanities (participatory culture, user-generated designs, creative networks). Enterprising Initiatives expands the definition of entrepreneurship beyond a primarily economic profit-seeking phenomenon to a broader understanding of enterprising behaviour based on an individual-opportunity nexus. Beyond social entrepreneurship, it explores a broad range of individual, collective and cooperative citizen initiatives under the umbrella of enterprising action.

This innovative approach will be of great interest to scholars in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, cultural entrepreneurship, cultural studies, and consumer culture, as well as for policy makers in public and local government, regional development and cultural event management.

1 Introduction

The Experience Economy: an ontological turn

Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Per Blenker

The early twenty-first century may have seen the world experience some of its most serious financial and environmental crises for decades, but against this bleak backdrop individual citizens, local communities and global networks have taken action and in doing so have fundamentally changed the power dynamics of their worlds. This book looks at how citizens have empowered themselves. We explore how consumers/prosumers in various fields are and could be transformed into produsers, empowered citizens, and potential entrepreneurs. Our aim is to investigate a number of strategies for transformative practices of intervention and performativity that primarily work with realizing potential, opportunity, and societal value creation. We investigate the Experience Economy from the view of the empowered citizen, rather than considering the relation between material and immaterial values from the producer’s and the consumer’s perspectives, respectively.

Instead of arguing that immaterial value-making is an expression of neoliberalist authoritarian capitalism (which is the claim of neo-Marxist theory, e.g., Terranova 2004), this book looks at how co-creation, participation and enterprising initiatives could help realize the full potential of modern citizens.

Let us begin by examining the concept of the Experience Economy in a little more detail. The term “Experience Economy” signifies the production and consumption of immaterial values as an extension of the production and consumption of commodities and products. From an anthropological point of view humans have always used symbolic exchange forms, gifts being one example. The Experience Economy’s history, therefore, extends back beyond the rise of industrial societies in the nineteenth century and was even in evidence before the social and political upheavals of the Renaissance. Within this frame consumption is just one form of material culture, when material culture is taken as the transfer of things in order to produce symbolic, social and affective values. From this perspective the Experience Economy is the general discovery and instrumental use of value creation that has always existed, only in its present instantiation it seems more intense. The Experience Economy implies a blurring of the boundaries between economic and cultural spheres, so the symbolic exchange functions that existed in pre-capitalist societies have become essential to late modern capitalism. Scholars have called it the cultural turn within business studies (Pine and Gilmore 1999; Ray and Sayer 1999; Gay and Pryke 2002; Boswijk et al. 2007, and it is now becoming widely recognized that while symbolic exchange systems function beyond capitalism, capitalism seems to be ever more dependent on immaterial value production.

The cultural turn along with the subsequent heightened focus on the consumer – on the “inner” life of the consumer, what Gilles Lipovetsky calls hyperconsumption – is significant because the general empowerment of consumers encompasses the possibility of altering both economy and culture. In the short history of the concept of the Experience Economy that dates from 1999, the year that Pine and Gilmore’s first book was published, there have already been two turns. The first turn can be seen as a turn from material production to immaterial production, focusing on the creation and exchange of signs and symbolic meaning. The second turn is a consequence of the first turn as it involves the integration of previously separated roles into the new prosument, where consumers are seen as the co-producer of experiences, social meanings and structures. Both the first and the second turn are well described and analyzed in literature (Pine and Gilmore 1999, 2007; Boswijk et al. 2007; Jantzen and Arendt Rasmussen 2007, 2007b; Bærenholdt and Sundbo 2007). Both turns are seen from the producer’s viewpoint, although they actually proclaim a blurred boundary between producer and consumer through the new concept of prosumer. Within these turns the prosumer’s activity plays itself out within frames they are not likely to question or change. It is, however, the ambition of this book to propose a third turn for the Experience Economy, one that conceptualizes it as an ontological change that shifts the perspective towards citizens’ initiatives within corporate or industrialized frames, parallel to those or independently of those.

This introductory chapter outlines two core strategies in the Experience Economy as an ontological turn: the first being the strategy of creating and inhabiting intensive environments (Lash and Lury 2007; Lash 2010) that bio-materialistically imply the bodies and feelings of its users and co-creators. Examples of this strategy tend to fall under the heading “Co-creating experiences.” A second and more radical strategy, following this ontological turn, is the use of transformative practices of intervention that bring change on larger societal levels. Both strategies offer new, often co-existing opportunities to inhabit the world either by re-enchanting our experience of the world – or by transforming it. The intensive re-enchanting environment-makings appear in consumption-, leisure- and lifestyle-spaces, but are likewise a sensuous and imaginary add-on in everyday or institutionalized spaces. Changing institutional tight spaces (e.g., spaces of learning: schools, high schools, universities; work places, the nursing sector: care homes, hospitals, the children’s sector: nurseries and day cares) into looser spaces through changes of the sensuous-aesthetic framing has a significant impact on the performance within these spaces even without alterations to the core input in these spaces. Stimulating schoolchildren through the décor of class rooms – for example by creating spaces of fantasy, wonder and amazement – could seem to be a detour to learning, but must be seen as a sensuous and imaginary add-on to a normally institutionalized tight space. Intensity can be established in two ways: either as a general mood and feeling that any institution, organization, community, social practice, relationship or personal life-design project must assign to and evoke in its users through various strategies; or as a measure of the degree of engagement and participation in any designed or built environment within the Experience Economy. Participation and co-creation can, therefore, be seen both as both a consequence of – and as a premise for – intensity-enhancing strategy. Participation enables intensity and at its best sometimes transformation on a larger societal level.

Participatory practices of culture

The change from producer-staged experiences towards co-created experiences is echoed culturally on the one hand by understandings of culture and identity as performative practices, and on the other hand by the pervasive nature of participatory culture facilitated by digital media. Evolving from social constructivist identity theories (Foucault 1994; Butler, 1993, 1999, 2004; Jenkins 2005) that are relational in nature we know that socio-cultural norms are quoted, imitated, negotiated, re-performed, re-mediated and hybridized through various performative practices. These norms pertain to the practices of private individuals, companies, as well as organizations and social groups in general.

It is all about performing and doing in order to produce platforms for identification, differences, visibility, belonging (as we shall develop below), engagement and change. Thus, cultural practices and identity work are dynamic processes constantly evolving new socio-cultural forms that are highly re-mediating and hybridizing old forms. Some cultural practices are conservative in nature and quote or imitate established norms and values within the social frame of, for example, the individual that cites and imitates. Other cultural practices are more progressive and transformational on a societal level (e.g., when Rosa Parks sat on the bus and challenged apartheid). Performative cultural practices can thus mirror (and so legitimize identity), slightly alter, critically negotiate, critically oppose (resist identity), or even create new cultural norms and values (project identity).¹

The message we want to put across is that if citizens, communities and publics in general took the social constructivist paradigm literally and acted for the benefit of the common good, much would change. Clearly, different kinds of regimes – authoritarian, totalitarian, failed states or states with practically no public sector – provide different backgrounds for the development of enterprise initiatives by civilians. Also it should not be assumed that non-democratic regimes prevent civil society from being enterprising; on the contrary, economic crises, poor performance in various sectors and cuts in public expenditure can prompt social innovation and mobilize action (Murray et al. 2010: 15). But the possibilities for these enterprising initiatives to feed into and enact change at a policy level (claiming civil rights for example) in non-democratic regimes are often limited in comparison to democratic societies.

In order to conceptualize the world-changing potential of enterprising initiatives, some chapters in this book (van Dam et al.; and Gyimóthy and Jensen) offer more nuanced accounts of participation and co-creation; while other authors draw their inspiration from field studies and offer qualitatively different evaluations of these (Stevens; Stage; Knudsen and Christensen). One line of inquiry is to take the social constructivist paradigm literally; another one is to consider how easy access to platforms of user-generated content through new digital technologies can facilitate and increase participation in society in general. To conceptualize the transformation of “people formerly known as the audience” into producers (Rosen 2006) through concepts such as “participatory culture” (Jenkins 2006; Burgess and Green 2009), “DIY media/culture” (Gauntlett 2011), “social production” (Benkler 2006), “co-creation” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004; Boswijk et al., 2007), and “productive publics” (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013) helps underline the urgent need to understand the roles of citizens as co-producers. The former audience is increasingly affecting, co-creating or participating in various projects that generate cultural and social value. The “WEconomy” and “Do it Yourself Society” are other terms for the same thing.

It has become irrelevant for institutions, organizations and businesses to question the level of participation in an initiative. Today it can be taken that the target audience participates. The question now is to what extent the publics/consumers/members/citizens participate and how engaged they become in the project.

Kelty and Panofsky (2014) have outlined seven normative dimensions of participation based on 102 case studies that can be used in the evaluation of any collaborative project. Four of the dimensions focus on the degree of influence of participants in setting goals and tasks, having control over resources, and having a voice, as well as having the right to exit the project without being punished and the opportunity to influence outcomes. The remaining three dimensions touch upon the concrete impact of the participation in question: visible metrics providing concrete outcomes, educative dividend and affective/communicative capacity-building skills producing learning, affiliation and sociability. In order for enterprising initiatives in the Experience Economy to be truly participatory (if that is the aim of the participants) they have to comply with these normative dimensions.

The logic of intensive environments: processes and events

We have mentioned above that the Experience Economy signifies an ontological turn pervading all social spheres. The consumer society of the 1960s saw society as a realm of signs that consumers could compete to acquire, and that provided a means for consumers to express hierarchical positions within social structure (Baudrillard 1970). However, since the mid-1990s a presentational logic inherent to digital culture has superseded the representational logic: “Meaning is no longer hermeneutic; it is operational, as in computer games – that is, meaning is not interpretative; it is doing, it is impact” (Lash and Lury 2007: 12). Scott Lash has pursued this idea in his book Intensive Culture. Social Theory, Religion and Contemporary Capitalism (2010), and points to two fundamental changes in contemporary Western cultures – that intensive cultures that are primarily individualistic will be challenged by relational cultures (China for example); and that the previous difference between the life-world as intense, and the system-world as extensive, no longer holds. These two come together and de-differentiate (ibid.: 19). According to Lash both worlds are ruled by this presentational logic. We also believe that this logic is pervasive in contemporary societies in the Western hemisphere and it is a cultural logic that the very concept of the Experience Economy is built upon, de-differentiating between economic and cultural spheres. The presentational logic of making an intensive environment that has an immediate impact is very much an execution of bio-power as it has to do with managing bodies, feelings and sensations in various ways in order to engage customers.

It is about being there in the peak of intensity; it is about feeling alive and changeable; and it is about getting in the mood and the feelings of something bigger and transcendent (history, spirituality, sociality). The production of and participation in intensive environments is one of the core ingredients of the Experience Economy not only on an economic level (consumption spaces as intensive environments), but also on a more general social level. So, for example, today’s Danish senior citizens are less likely to leave large legacies to their descendants than their forbears. Some commentators have argued that this is a manifestation of the individualistic and narcissistic principles of the generation that grew up in the 1960s. But at the same time there is data to show that today’s senior citizens are more likely to spend money on common experiences and travel that include the younger generations. The inheritance is quite literally exchanged for a communal presence in the form of an intense family experience.

Intensity is thus both something we are subjected to via new developments in capitalism, and “a tool” anybody can use in order to reach various goals. corruptiontours.com is a Czech travel agency invented by young entrepreneurs who want to make money out of corruption. They stage corruption as a series of tourist sights to visit and gaze upon, although there is not much to see. The guides on the tours build up allegories, use humor, irony and sarcasm in order to reframe what a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Experience Economy – an ontological turn
• PART I Empowered and empowering citizens
• PART II Remaking enterprises
• PART III Producing entrepreneurs
• PART IV Framing experiences
• Index